taxing

Just a thought - what if all the money col­lected in taxes by the gov­ern­ment was used to fund our actual health­care, pen­sions, edu­ca­tion, social secu­rity, and nothing on interest on the national debt? I rec­om­mend watching this inter­view instead of your next trip to the cinema:

“… Why are we allowing these pri­vate bankers to make the money for our country? It makes no sense! Why are we paying interest to these banks to make money for us, when the Gov­ern­ment can do it itself, without paying interest, and without all that debt…”

Or watch «America: Freedom to Fas­cism», a smor­gas­bord of insights and chal­lenging thoughts that will make you think dif­fer­ently about money, wealth and the economy. Gold-backing seems to be the obvious choice to go back to, but as Money as Debt Part III argues (see from 1:54:10), this could just mean his­tory repeating itself and is not a true inno­v­a­tive step. If gov­ern­ment issued money instead of bor­rowing it from pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions, humon­gous amounts of interest being paid to pri­vate bankers could be saved, Freedom to Fas­cism argues that this would com­pletely remove the need to (ille­git­i­mately) charge income tax on wages and salaries. But this would still be a cen­tralist approach, sub­ject to inertia and large-scale cor­rup­tion, and depen­dent on the politi­cians’ hon­esty and com­pe­tence. Gov­ern­ments would still be at lib­erty to create all the money they want to spend on wars. And like gold-backed money, it would also still be a single uni­form com­modity, “man­i­festing all the inherent math­e­mat­ical defects of lending at interest and twice-lent money.” (Money as Debt Part III)

The ulti­mate solu­tion pro­posed by Paul Grignon is self-issued credit - barter net­works, time banks, regional voucher schemes (“cur­ren­cies”). If these get “too suc­cessful”, they get squashed by the con­ven­tional mon­e­tary author­i­ties - which must be seen as a good sign that they’re on to some­thing. The basis of a func­tioning, sus­tain­able mon­e­tary system would be that the def­i­n­i­tion of money is changed to “some­thing redeemable for some­thing spe­cific from someone spe­cific”…

Some quotes

From the movie «America: Freedom to Fas­cism». As often with these pithy nuggets of wisdom, they are unver­i­fied, prob­ably apoc­ryphal or spu­rious. They are still beau­tiful and it is proven or at least plau­sible that they are para­phrases of things these people really said or wrote. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by them, even if their authen­ticity is dubious.

“The gov­ern­ment should create, issue and cir­cu­late all the cur­rency.
Cre­ating and issuing money is the supreme pre­rog­a­tive of gov­ern­ment
and its greatest cre­ative oppor­tu­nity.

Adopting these prin­ci­ples will save the tax­payers immense sums of interest
and money will cease to be the master and become the ser­vant of humanity.”

~Abraham Lin­coln

“If the Amer­ican people ever allow the banks to con­trol the issuance of their currency…the banks and cor­po­ra­tions that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all prop­erty, until their chil­dren wake up home­less on the con­ti­nent their fathers con­quered.”

~Thomas Jef­ferson

“The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again.

How­ever, take away from them the power to create money, and all the great for­tunes like mine will dis­ap­pear and they ought to dis­ap­pear, for this would be a hap­pier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them con­tinue to create money.”

~Sir Josiah Stamp, Former Director of the Bank of Eng­land

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not under­stand our banking and mon­e­tary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a rev­o­lu­tion before tomorrow morning.”

~Henry Ford

The indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion and exploita­tion of fossil resources cre­ated a huge bubble of pro­duc­tivity and wealth and allowed world pop­u­la­tion to surge impres­sively. It also allowed, and required, an explo­sion in money supply, that sub­se­quently went out of pro­por­tion and got hooked on the idea of per­petual, expo­nen­tial growth. The pri­mary pur­pose of a tax is to put a levy or charge on a scarce good. (The German word for tax is “Steuer” lit­er­ally “a steering”.) So why don’t we tax the things that we want to use less of - like con­ven­tional (fossil) energy, or land sur­face area, inversely based on eco­log­ical integrity (so you’d pay much less tax on forest floor than on areas sealed with tarmac)?